[RPG-Ducky]

Hiya, everyone!

I am currently trying to translate Terranigma for the Super Nintendo into Danish, and while I was doing research, I discovered that the game makes use of a sort of expanded DTE, called MTE, where words that the game frequently uses are stored in shorter hex code. This is where I'm stuck. First of all, should I even translate it, or should I just write my entire translation in normal hex, or will that take up too much space on the ROM (which I suspect)? And, if I need to translate it, how do I go about doing that?

Thanks in advance!

[justin3009]

I'd recommend translating it as those are SERIOUS space savers.  If anything, there's more than likely pointers TO them.  If you need more room, you'd probably just need to move the text somewhere else and repoint them, much like the dialogue.

[VicVergil]

Your first draft shall be the whole text without mte and all that fancy stuff.
Then you run your text through an utility like dte seek (i'm loking for better alternatives, so if anyone knows pleasebe my guest) which will give you a new dictionnary much more tailor made for your danish script (for perspective, this applied to the unaltered chrono trigger script makes it go from the official almost 500kb with official mte to 300kb with optimized mte). For example the English mte still has an actraiser entry used only once in the whole script... then removed since it was part of the jp only quintet quiz.
You may want to keep some dictionnary entries though.
check datacrystal and use cartographer to dump the dictionnary.

One more thing, the kanji is still fully working in the dirty romhack that was the official PAL release, so that gives you 600 more (2 byte) symbols for your graphical MTE needs... if you figure out a way to make the 8x16 hack display those as 16x16, that is.